The Seventh Noon Part 7

"If you will steady me a bit," she answered.

"Are you hurt?"

"Just dazed a little. Did you stop him?"

"Stop him? Then some one did go out?"

"As I opened the door Ben rushed by me and--I fell down. I hoped you might see him and hold him!"

"I was at the other end of the library. He must have stolen out on tiptoe. But you are faint."

"I am stronger now."

She started down the stairs with the help of the banister, holding herself together with remarkable self control. As they came into the light he saw that she was very pale, but she insisted that she needed nothing but a breath of cool air. He helped her to the door and here she sat down for a moment upon the step.

"I might take a look around the grounds," Donaldson suggested.

"It is quite useless. He is not here."

"Then you have an idea where he has gone!"

She hesitated a moment.

"Yes," she answered.

He waited, but she ventured nothing further.

"I want you to feel," he said quietly, "that you may call upon me for anything you wish done. My time is my own--quite my own. I place it at your service."

She turned to study his face a moment. It was clean and earnest. It bade her trust. Yet to ask him to do what lay before her was to bring him, a stranger, into the heart of her family affairs. It was to involve her in an intimacy from which instinctively she shrank. But pressing her close was the realization of the imminent danger threatening the boy. This was no time for quibbling--no time for nice shadings of propriety. Even if this meant a sacrifice of something of herself, she must cling to the one spar that promised a chance for her brother's safety. As Donaldson's eyes met hers, she felt ashamed that she had hesitated even long enough for these thoughts to flash through her brain.

"The boy uses opium," she said without equivocation.

The bare naming of the drug rolled up the curtain before the whole tragedy which had been suggested by the portrait in the library; it explained every detail of this wild night except her presence here practically alone with the crazed young man. It accounted for her objection to waiting in the drugstore; it solved the mystery of her fear of the city shadows. Had he suspected this, he would no more have allowed her to go up those stairs alone than he would have permitted her to go unescorted into the cell of a madman.

"I 'm sorry for him," he murmured. "Then he has gone straight to Mott Street?"

"I 'm afraid so. He has been there once before."

"The habit has been long upon him?"

"It is inherited. This is the third generation," she admitted, turning her head aside in shame.

"But he himself--"

"Only after his father's death. The father feared this and watched him every minute. He died thinking the danger was pa.s.sed, but he left me a prescription which had been of help to him. It was given him by our old family physician who has since died. Mr. Barstow knew Dr. Emory and so has always prepared it for me."

"How long this last time did he go without the drug?"

"It is three months since the first attack. This medicine tided him over five days. He was nervous to-night and begged me to go out to dinner with him. I 'm afraid it was unwise--the lights and the music excited him."

"But you have n't been here alone with him?"

"There is Marie."

"Two women alone with a man in that condition--it is n't safe."

"You don't understand how good he has been. He has struggled hard. He has allowed me to lock him up--to do everything to help him. He has never been like this before."

"It is n't safe for you," he repeated. "Are there no relatives I may summon?"

"None," she answered. "I am his cousin--his sister by adoption. There are no other relatives."

"No friends?"

"I would rather fight it out alone," she answered firmly. "I don't wish my friends to know about this," she added hastily, as though to avoid further discussion along this line.

"It was careless of me to leave the door open as I went in."

"It was lucky for you. He might have--"

"Don't!" she shuddered.

He waited a moment.

"You are brave," he declared, "but this is too big a problem for you to manage. He should have been placed in the hands of a physician."

"No," she interrupted. "No one must know of this. I trust you to tell no one of this."

He thought a moment.

"Very well. But in order to locate him now, it will be necessary to call in the help of the police."

"The police!" she exclaimed in horror. "No! You must promise me you will not do that."

She rose to her feet all excitement.

"They would not arrest him," he a.s.sured her. "They would simply hold him until we came for him."

"I would rather not. I would rather wait until he comes back himself than do that."

He could not understand her fear, but he was bound to respect it.

"Very well," he answered quietly. "But I have a friend whom I can trust. You do not mind if I enlist his help?"

"He is of the police?" she asked suspiciously.

"He is a friend," he replied. "It is as a friend he will do this for me."